While running for president in 2019, then-U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris suddenly claimed she had done something very relatable: worked at a McDonald’s while attending college.
After two decades in the public eye, which included writing two books about herself that never mentioned employment at McDonald’s, all of a sudden, during that failed 2019 presidential run, the McDonald’s job became a centerpiece of her campaign.
“I heard a rumor that you worked at McDonald’s?” a sycophantic Drew Barrymore asked Harris during an appearance on Barrymore’s dumb daytime talk show in 2019.
“I did. Yes, I did work at McDonald’s,” confirmed Harris. “When I was at school … I did fries. And then I did the cashier.”
A wide-eyed Barrymore responded, “I didn’t know that about you.”
There’s a real whodunit: Gee, I wonder where Barrymore “heard” that “rumor?”
Now that incumbent Vice President Kamala Harris is running for president, she has continued with the claim. Here’s the far-left Politico gushing over it:
The ad’s narration asserted that Harris worked at McDonald’s to “pay her way” through college. But that wasn’t quite right: She really took the summer job just to earn a bit more spending money.
The ad was quickly re-cut, just another wrinkle to iron out amid a fast-moving presidential campaign that has reconstituted itself around a new nominee. But the mix-up aside, aides agreed about what they saw as a small but important piece of Harris’ backstory: They wanted voters to know she worked at McDonald’s.
But.
Kamala’s claim is now facing serious scrutiny, thanks mainly to some excellent journalism at the Washington Free Beacon.
Despite a concerted effort to verify the McDonald’s job, the Free Beacon has found no evidence backing up CacklyMcNeverBorderCzar’s claim.
“It is possible that Harris did indeed work at McDonald’s in the early 1980s,” reports the Free Beacon. “But the absence of that detail in public records and her campaign’s coyness and refusal to provide any further details raise questions[.]”
“On Monday, the New York Times reported without attribution that after a move to Canada, Harris ‘return[ed] to the Bay Area for a summer during college when she worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, a city next to Oakland.” But, the Free Beacon adds, “Harris was attending college at Howard University in Washington, D.C.”
“If some details of the job have varied, while others are murky, that might be because there is no record of Harris mentioning the McDonald’s job before that labor rally in Las Vegas in June 2019.”
This includes no mention of this summer job in either of her memoirs — one published in 2010, the other in 2019.
The most damning piece of evidence that the Free Beacon unearthed comes in the form of a 1987 job application. As a second-year law student, Harris applied for “a law clerk position in the Alameda County district attorney’s office.”
This application required the applicant to “list every position she held in the last 10 years.” Harris made no mention of a job at McDonald’s, which would have fallen under the ten-year limit.
She did list a clerical job she only held for a month. She also listed “granular life experience[s] on her résumé—‘extensive travel in India, Africa, [and] Europe’ and ‘lived in Montreal, Canada for six years’—but not McDonald’s.”
The Free Beacon says it has reached out to the Harris campaign for specifics on her time at McDonald’s, but, after two weeks, there has been no response.
The Free Beacon is correct. We may discover Harris did work at McDonald’s for a time. But it’s quite a thing when two news outlets that pretend to be serious about their reporting — the far-left Politico and far-left New York Times — report something central to a presidential candidate’s biography without seeming to fact-check it.
Even if it is discovered that Harris is indeed lying about that McDonald’s job, the media will brush it aside as though someone willing to lie about something that really doesn’t matter is not willing to lie about things that do matter — such as her policy positions involving fracking bans, electric vehicle mandates, opening the southern border even wider to the third world, and stripping every American of their private insurance through a Medicare for All scheme.
Democrats sure got it good.
John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.
